Subtitle: Nothing is more important to both Protestant and Roman Catholic as this issue of whether the Bible is the sole source of Divine Word, knowledge and inspiration. Read both sides of the issue and make up your mind. Author is Becky Sexton, Former Catholics For Christ [FCFC]

QUESTION #TWENTY-FIVE -- During the Middle Ages, did the Catholic Church manifest hostility to the Bible as her adversaries claim?

Catholic Answer -- Under stress of special circumstances, various regulations were made by the Church to protect the people from being spiritually poisoned by the corrupted and distorted translations of the Bible; hence opposition to the Waldensians, Albigensians, Wycliff and Tyndale.

THEIR COMMENT:

Individual churchmen may at times have gone too far in their zeal, not to belittle the Bible, but to protect it. There is no human agency in which authority is always exercised blamelessly.

FCFC'S ANSWER:

Yes, the Roman Catholic church has manifested a great deal of hostility towards the Bible and those who followed it. The Waldensians, Albigensians, Lombards, and countless others suffered unthinkable persecution for clinging to God's word and refusing Rome's bible, traditions and pagan doctrines. The Council of Trent in 1546 called Jerome's Latin Vulgate the church's "authentic version", yet Pope Sixtus, in 1588 declared in a 300 word sentence, that the pope was the only proper person to decide the question of an authentic Bible. So he took it upon himself to rewrite the Bible, which took him 18 months. The work was so disastrous, that as soon as he died, Rome did everything she could to cover up the blunder of her "infallible" pope. The truth is that Rome really has little need for the Bible in her ritualistic system of traditions. Catholicism is obvious in her contempt for the Bible as shown by dialogue from The Question Box Column, Brooklyn Tablet, Nov. 8, 1958:

"Tradition as a source of Faith would suffice without Scripture".

At the Council of Toulouse ( 1229), Gregory 1X forbade the laity to read the Bible and pronounced, "It is the duty of every Catholic to persecute heretics" (Vicars of Christ, De Rosa, 162). Rather than accuse the Roman Catholic Church of not loving God's Holy word, we have decided to let her speak for herself. The following quotes are taken from Catholic sources only.

"The very nature of the Bible ought to prove to any thinking man the impossibility of its being the one safe method to find out what the Savior taught"

(Question Box, 67, 1913 edition).

"The Bible does not pretend to be a formulary of belief, as is a creed or a catechism. There is nowhere in the New Testament a clear, methodical statement of the teaching of Christ"

(Question Box, 66).

"Again, it has ever been practically impossible for men to generally, find out Christ from the Bible only"

(Question Box, 70).

"The Scripture indeed is a divine book but it is a dead letter, which has to be explained, and cannot exercise the action which the preacher can obtain"

(Our Priesthood, 155).

"A dead and speechless book"

(Question Box, 67).

"The sacred writers may have been unaware of the fact of their inspiration"

(Question Box, 80). (Not according to 1Cor.14:37 where Pau1 said, "...the things that I write unto you are the commandments of the Lord.")

"The reformation produced indeed an exaggerated individualism, which by declaring every man equally competent to find out the doctrine of the Savior from his own private reading of the Scriptures, has led millions to the utter denial of Christ"

(Question Box, 131).

"At Toledo, A young woman who had gained a reputation of virtue, petitioned to be admitted (to a monastery) to the habit, but added: ‘I will bring with me my Bible.’ ‘What!’ said the Saint (Teresa), ‘Your Bible? Do not come to us. We are poor women who know nothing but to spin and to do what we are bid’"

(Butler’s Lives of Saints, X, 366).

"The Protestants start with the unproved assumption that the Bible is the inspired word of God"

(Question Box, 66).

"On the contrary, we do not in any way presuppose that the books of the New Testament are inspired but only that they are genuine, authentic documents, written by honest men"

(Question Box, 80).

"Inspiration does not prevent the, author of Leviticus from being the I most boring of lawyers, the compiler of the Chronicles from being totally devoid of talent, or the author of the Apocalypse from making many syntactical mistakes in his Greek"

"There is no reason to suppose the author of the book, i.e., of Esther, received any revelation"

(Catholic Dictionary, 450).

"More than this, parts of the Bible are evidently unsuited to the very young or to the ignorant, and hence Clement XI condemned the proposition that the reading of the Scripture is for all"

(Catholic Dictionary, 82) (Luke 10:21 records Jesus thanking the Father that He has given unto babes what He has kept from the learned!).

"The Catholic Church is opposed chiefly by three enemies; the civil power...Bible Reading Protestantism; and infidelity"

(History of the Catholic Church, Brennan, 242).

"It is said that we deprive the Faithful of the word of God, which is the soul's daily bread. We may answer this falsehood by stating that while, indeed the Scripture is our soul's daily bread, Mother Church proportions it to our needs. Just as parents do not give the whole loaf to their children, or a knife with which to cut it lest they injure themselves, so is it the duty of the Church, of the priest or the preacher, to distribute the spiritual bread of the word of God to the people in portions suited to their requirements. It is said that the word of God is the light of the world. Well indeed we do admit this truth. But we do not place a lighted candle in a child's hands, lest he burn himself"

(The Priest, His Dignity and Obligations, "St". John Eudes, 9).

"From all which it must be abundantly clear that the Bible alone is not a safe and competent guide because it is not now and has never been accessible to all, because it is not clear and intelligible to all, and because it does not contain all the truth of the Christian religion"

(Finding Christ's Church, John O'Brien, 20).

"His (Ezekiel's) book is amazingly confused. It claims to have been written in exile at Babylon. But the many obvious and curious editorial tricks have given rise to the hypothesis that the oracles were uttered in Palestine, then touched up and published at Babylon... Numerous obscurities in the text...It is for exegetes and the theologians and, in the last resort, for the teaching authority of the Catholic church, to discriminate between what is mythical in the Biblical text and what in the myth deserves to be retained as true. That a serpent spoke is a myth"

(20th Century Encyclopedia of Catholicism, Vol. 29 and 63).

"The events related in Holy Scripture are only occasionally correlated with events of secular history and are seldom dated according to an era or epoch... Those that precede the time of Abraham, cannot be determined even approximately. In Genesis 5 and 10, we have fables of chronological units, but for various reasons the numbers given in our present text are considered corrupted and the fables themselves incomplete...During the period of the two kingdoms we come to the first dates on which all authorities agree, because they are found recorded on Assyrian monuments"

(Catholic Dictionary, Vatican Edition, 212).

"The chapters with which the Bible begins, the book of Genesis, obviously belong to a complex species of literature in which history, popular tradition and folklore, moral teaching and cosmogonical revelation are all mixed together and borne aloft on the wings of admirable poetry. As for the actual history to be found in the Bible, it is perfectly obvious that it does not obey the often ridiculously artificial criteria of the historical science of today"

"Here is a chapter that presents formidable difficulties. Ever since Galileo it has been the object of learned discussion. Moses described God's creating the universe in six days. But science has proved that our earth broke off from the sun millions of years ago. The gradual cooling and hardening of this earth, the formulation of continents and seas, the invasion of glaciers, form an epic narrative of staggering time proportions. Only in quite recent times did this earth bring forth the animals and vegetation of today, these having evolved gradually from different forms. Can the six days of which Moses speaks be these long periods described by geologists? ‘Answering the oft-repeated query, the association replies: ‘Certainly they are not’. Moses knew nothing of modern science: his picture of the universe is quite naive, no further advanced, in fact, than that of the people among whom he lived three thousand years ago’"

(Getting the Most Out of'the Bible, O'Brien, 16).

"Yet it does happen that some devout Christians experience a certain disappointment when they open the Bible. They expect to find uplifting and heartwarming phrases and are faced instead with dry lists of ritual observances, fierce imprecations of some of the prophet and the enigmatic sentences of the Apocalypse-if not the matrimonial adventures of the Kings. It must be admitted that the Bible in no way resembles a manual of devotion; apart from the Gospels and sapiential books, it has little to offer the believer nourished on the Imitation even the Spiritual Exercise St. Ignatius of Loyola"

"In other spiritual books the truths of the Bible are presented more fully, and in a more modern and familiar style, so that we can hardly wonder that they are, as a rule preferred"

(Plain Facts For Fair Minds, Searle, 154).

To sum up Catholic teaching on the Holy word of God, we see they feel the Bible is "not a safe book"(Question Box, 67), it was "forbidden for hundreds of years" (Catholic Dictionary, 82, Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, 273-278), that "other books are better and are preferred" (Plain Facts, 154), that "Bible reading has led millions away from the Catholic Church (Question Box, I 31), that Bible reading does" "more harm than good" (Council of Trent, Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, 274), that "the Catholic Church does not need the Bible" (Plain Facts, 33), that "the Bible is not clear" (Question Box, 66), that "it is impossible to learn the truth from it" (Plain Facts, 132,133), and that it is "not fit to read" (Catholic Dictionary 32, 1937 Franciscan Almanac, I 14).

"The wise men are ashamed, they are dismayed and taken: lo, they have rejected the word of the LORD; and what wisdom is in them."

Cutting Edge Comment: The Roman Catholic Church showers God with great disrespect when she declares the opposite about the Bible than God Himself declares! As FCFC so aptly declares, above, God has repeatedly declared His Word to be most precious, most powerful and a document that men can literally entrust their eternal souls to! By declaring that God does not know what He is talking about, the Roman Catholic Church finds herself fighting God, just as the early Pharisees were doing in Acts 5:39.

Indeed, the Roman Catholic Church spilled much more Christian blood in her fight against God, as did the early Pharisees. Jesus gave us THE one clear way to know the truth of a person or an organization. In Matthew 7:16-20, Jesus gave us a very clear barometer by which we can tell if a person or organization is truly Christian, or just a very clever counterfeit. Listen:

" Ye shall know them by their fruits ... Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them."

What are the main fruits of Roman Catholicism over the past 1,500 years? They have murdered over 8 million Protestants and hundreds of thousands of Jews. They have hounded every one who did not believe exactly as the Church told them to believe. The Roman Church instituted the most dictatorial, most repressive "spiritual" rule that man has ever seen, backed by the sword!

These are the true fruits of the Roman Catholic Church in history. But, in the near future, all Catholics will see the real face of Catholicism up front and personal. In NEWS1052, we report that the New World Order Plan has given the office of the global leadership of the coming religion of Antichrist to the Roman Catholic Pope! This momentous revelation brands the Pope as the Biblical False Prophet of Revelation 13:11-18, a man who looks like, talks like, and is accepted as, a Christian, but inside he has the heart of Hell.

We prayerfully urge all Roman Catholics to consider our words well, for events are going to begin transpiring that will shake this world to its foundation, and very soon, you will have to make decisions that will determine your eternal destiny. What are some of these events that are so momentous and so revealing for anyone who knows their Biblical prophecies? We shall list just a few for you, below.

The Roman Catholic Pope will rush to the support of the newly arisen New Age Christ [the Biblical Antichrist], and he will be able to do the same miracles as Antichrist [Revelation 13:11-13]

The Roman Pontiff will propose that a statue be built in the image of the Antichrist, and will force all of the world to worship it, on the pain of death. By the way, Pope John Paul II has reinstated the hated Office of the Inquisition, now called Defender of the Faith. [Revelation 13:14b-15]

The Pope will suddenly declare that peoples of the entire world will be forced to worship Antichrist, and as a sign of their obedience and loyalty, each person will have to take some sort of a mark, either in the right hand or the forehead. This is the infamous Mark of the Beast. Anyone who refuses to take this Mark will be killed, by the forces of the Pope. [Revelation 13:16-18]

If you have never accepted Jesus Christ as Savior, but have come to realize His reality and want to accept His FREE Gift of Eternal Life, you can also do so now, in the privacy of your home. Once you accept Him as Savior, you are spiritually Born Again, and are as assured of Heaven as if you were already there. Then, you can rest assured that nothing will not hurt you spiritually. You will also know the greatest heart peace that the greatest God can give to one of His own children.

If you would like to become Born Again, and come to know this wonderful heart peace, turn to our Salvation Page now.